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Targeted advertising - reinventing the wheel rather than a new idea.

Digital or online advertising has many ways of targeting the ads to your particular market segment. Digital marketing channels may advertise this ‘targeting’ as ‘new’ but in reality this is simply applying a well established and proven technique in the print advertising marketing to digital and online media.

For many years marketing managers have carefully selected which magazines or journals to advertise in (selecting the audience) or which billboards to use (geographical and footfall choices) and which TV programmes or times of day to purchase ad slots in (audience demographic and lifestyle interest).

The real breakthrough was changes or improvements in the technologies used and in data acquisition. This makes it possible to target your digital ads based on:

Geographical location, even as specific as areas of cities for ads to mobile devices.

Language preference

Technology use, so specific types of mobile or tablet can be targeted. Very useful for promoting technology add ons.

Age and gender on many of the social platforms

Hobbies and interests as defined by social preferences

Products recently viewed – those products currently being researched for purchase.

More recent technology inventions are taking this further to include video screens in public areas or within shops. For example the Rigene project is using data from smart cards to build up a profile of the crowd in an area and base the adverts shown on this. The concept of showing the best ads for the crowd is no new, but the methods of collecting data and acting on it is new.

Some of the ideas in the Rigene project may seem far fetched – but they are being used already in the fashion industry. For example the London Burberry store shows ads on a huge advertising screen based on RFID tags within any Burberry clothes worn by customers.

The Rigene and Burberry projects required considerable investment, but targeted online advertising does not need this. Targeted digital advertising has low entry costs and is very effective. ExtraDigital have provided targeted online marketing to businesses of all sizes and from eCommerce shops through to B2B websites, consultants (wanting leads) or PR websites.